Abstract
Services of ethics consultants are nowadays commonly used in such various spheres of life as engineering, public administration, business, law, health care, journalism, and scientific research. It has however been maintained that use of ethics consultants is incompatible with personal autonomy; in moral matters individuals should be allowed to make their own decisions. The problem this criticism refers to can be conceived of as a conflict between the professional autonomy of ethics experts and the autonomy of the persons they serve. This paper addresses this conflict and maintains that when the nature of both ethics consultation and individual autonomy is properly understood, the professional autonomy of ethics experts is compatible with the autonomy of the persons they assist.
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Notes
Of course, informed consent procedures allowing autonomous patients to make their own decisions concerning their treatment are widely used in the Western world, but the reason for the adoption of these procedures is not that patients would have more expertise in questions of medicine than physicians but that of securing that patients are treated in ways that accord with their own values.
Admittedly, some philosophers claim to be able to present answers to all fundamental moral problems or at least to have procedures for determining what they are [13].
By ‘expert’ I mean, roughly, a person with special knowledge and skills that give her legitimate claim to epistemic authority within a domain (Cf. 12(pp. 62–63)). ‘Ethics’ is here understood in a wide sense in which it concerns all considerations pertaining to the moral value of human conduct and to the moral reasons, rules, and principles that ought to govern it.
I present further elucidation of the kind of ethical expertise I consider possible and legitimate below.
One line of criticism against the possibility of ethical expertise refers to an alleged disparity between science and ethics. It is maintained that while science focuses on factual matters about which it is possible to have objective knowledge, ethics concerns values which depend for their existence on persons’ desires and attitudes and about which there is no objective knowledge to be had. The possibility of ethical expertise thus presupposes that ethics is factual and objective like science and because it is not, this line of thinking proceeds, there cannot be expertise in ethics [2, 8]. As I have addressed this criticism of the possibility of ethical expertise elsewhere [14], I will not go into it here.
A strict Kantian theory of autonomy could maintain that autonomous persons are individuals whose actions are determined by impartial and abstract principles of reason alone; autonomous persons do not give weight to the values, desires, and wishes they have as individual persons. As their concentration is on abstract principles of rationality, it is arguable that the purely rationalistic theories of autonomy aim to explicate a different idea of autonomy than the one that is considered to be relevant in contemporary applied ethics. When it refers to autonomous persons’ decisions and actions, contemporary applied ethics is interested in the ways that persons behave as the persons that they are, or after they have been provided with information considered relevant to their making certain decisions, not in the manner that beings with no personal values, desires, and wishes would behave in certain kind of ideal circumstances.
It is arguable that at least in their self-regarding matters autonomous individuals can have false and inconsistent beliefs if they autonomously accept that. A person can, for example, autonomously consider some decision she is to make so trivial for her that she is not willing to gather the information that, other things being equal, can be considered relevant from the point of view of making it.
For useful discussion on what kinds of fundamental moral views rational persons (should) accept see [21].
It could be objected that a moral particularist, a proponent of the view that the moral status of actions cannot be determined in abstract of the concrete situations in which they are, or would be, performed, can deny these moral views. However, some moral particularists do allow that there are reasons that function the same way across different cases [22], (pp.77–78) and it is difficult to see how particularists could deny, for example, that it is wrong to make false promises when other things are being equal. For criticism of moral particularism see, e.g. [23].
These principles are formal in the sense that they do not commit one to any specific substantive morality, but not in the sense that they would be completely morally neutral.
For discussion on the issue of who should be counted as concerned parties in these kinds of cases see, e.g.,[27]. I now abstract from the question of how different kinds of non-autonomous morally relevant beings should be accounted for in cases like this.
By the philosophical tools an ethics expert uses in her work I mean the philosophical methods by which the expert arrives at certain moral conclusions. In analytic moral philosophy, that means conceptual analysis and commonly the use of the method of wide reflexive equilibrium. In using that method, roughly, our strongly held and justifiable moral and prudential intuitions, factual knowledge concerning ourselves and our environment, and the requirements of logic are brought into a coherent whole in answering the moral problem faced [28–30]. See also the discussion on the nature of ethical expertise above.
It is of course controversial whether all autonomous persons are also moral persons, and it might be taken that adopting the kind of procedural conception of autonomy accepted here commits one to accepting that autonomous persons need not want to be moral. However, I assume that those maintaining that we should reject ethics consultation because autonomous persons should be allowed to make their own moral decisions are not suggesting that in practice we morally should allow persons to reject morality altogether if that is what they autonomously want. I thus take it that the question here is not that of whether or not we ought to be moral, but that what would be a morally justified way of making moral decisions. For an argument that it would be rational to be moral formulated in terms of formal requirements of rationality see [31–33].
All uses of ethical expertise do not of course involve face-to-face contact between ethical experts and their clients. In the cases where there is no such communication, ethics consultants should provide in writing clear and understandable accounts of the reasoning that led them to advocate the moral views that they recommend.
Of course, engaging in ethics consultation can also deepen the ethics experts’ understanding of concrete moral problems, how varied these problems can be and how different kinds of points of view persons can have to them, and thereby enhance their professional competence.
My purpose here is not to solve the question of whether or not voluntary euthanasia is morally acceptable or to present a first-person point of view of what it is like to be an ethics expert facing the problem in practice. The point of this example is to demonstrate the practical implications of the main argument of this paper, the argument to the effect that ethics experts’ professional autonomy need not be incompatible with the autonomy of their clients.
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Acknowledgments
I thank participants in the philosophy research seminar of the Department of Philosophy at University of Turku, Finland and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
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Varelius, J. Ethics Consultation and Autonomy. Sci Eng Ethics 14, 65–76 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-007-9033-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-007-9033-6